Dumbest theory of the Aughts (2000-2010)?

It's a dead heat between "sterotype threat" & "dispirate impact theory".

1. “Stereotype Threat”, of course is the currently popular theory that African Americans average lower scores on cognitive tests in response to stereotypes held by the testers (or, as is sometimes argued, by the "society" writ large).
One cannot truelly touch on "Sterotype Threat" without quoting the one and only Steve Sailer,

"Yet, the facts about IQ tend to be so one-sided that the anti-IQ case has been largely left to be argued by lightweights, such as business book author Malcolm Gladwell. (See his New York Times dispute with Harvard cognitive science heavyweight Steven Pinker, in which Gladwell is left with little ammunition other than ad hominems, including an attack on me).[ Let’s Go to the Tape, Letter By Malcolm Gladwell, NYT<>

Over the last 15 years, the most popular theory about IQ has been “Stereotype Threat”. The New York Times summarized it in its 2009 Year in Ideas featurette on the purported “Obama Effect”—the widespread assumption that the politician’s success might raise black test scores:

“In 1995, two Stanford psychologists, Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson, demonstrated that African-American college students did worse on tests of academic ability when they were exposed beforehand to suggestions that they were being judged according to their race. Steele and Aronson hypothesized that this effect, which they labeled stereotype threat, might explain part of the persistent achievement gap between white and black students. In the years since, this idea has spread throughout the social sciences.”

S-u-r-e it has!

I summarized the logic behind this extrapolation in my 2004 VDARE.com article, Occam's Butterknife:

“At some point back in the mists of time, a stereotype somehow emerged that blacks do less well on the SAT. So, now, blacks are seized by panic over the possibility they might mess up and score so poorly that they validate this stereotype. And, indeed, this nervousness makes them score exactly as badly as the stereotype predicted they would.”

Stereotype Threat is a beautiful theory. Indeed, I myself have often felt there might even be a little bit of truth to the idea that expectations matter—even though common sense suggests that incentives matter more."

2. The message of "disparate impact" theory is if minorities fail tests at a higher rate than whites, it’s the test that’s wrong." The theory of “disparate impact” is also the keystone of the government’s anti-discrimination enforcement since the 1970s assumes that differences in achievement among the races should be minimal—otherwise the employer must rigorously justify itself. (Or, to be safe from lawsuits, the employer can impose quotas on itself, as New Haven did in the Ricci firemen case now before the Supreme Court).

3. The wildcard for dumbest theory: "discriminatory results". This is tied up with dispirate impact but it seems to stand on its own as a incredibly dumb theory. This theory was pioneered by judges this decade especially and has been employed recently in such cases such as Vulcan Society v. New York, wherein judges cited as proof of discrimination in the New York Fire Department's entrace exam not any test questions that are in any way discrimatory but the very results of the tests themselves divided by racial lines. Therefore if a test chronically produces test results that put black testtakers at the bottom of the barrel (to an extent deemed unacceptable), then, according to the liberal judges who favor the concept of "discrimatory results", they're surely must be something racist about the test for there is no way that black testtakers could have just gotten the worst test scores on average on a entrace exam because of there own merits. One would think that then the next question would be to see if there was something indeed actually "racist" about the test in question but Judges today don't take the effort to prove the existence of any discriminatory questions in tests they just deem that any test that doesn't produce sufficiently diverse results is legally "discrimatory". Meaning that if a city doesn't throw out a test with the wrong racial outcome (according to the EEOC) is making itself as a city and/or its fire department or police department liable for a massive discrimination lawsuit from the EEOC or the SPLC or indivual blacks who took the said civil service exam and didn't get a passing score.
Essentially if anybody truelly took this idea seriously it would mean suing every school in America for discrimination for almost every nation wide test, such as SAT's, always produce a result inwhich whites come out on top and black far at the bottom which according to this absurdist theory would be absolute proof of disciminatory tests. Even, as in the case of the New Haven Fire Fighters, if the exam in question has been checked not once but twice by proffesional testing companys that are paid to check if a civil service exam is diversity friendly enough, it doesn't matter.